Monday, January 13, 2014

Reference and assets

Last week I walked around Riga to take some photos of Art-Nouveau buildings. There are quite a lot of images, so I'm not going to post them all. However, the full album can be found here.

Most of my other reference is collected from various sources on the internet.

I've decided to figure out the best layout of the old building first, then build the futuristic elements on top of that. At least, this is what would happen in a real life scenario.
After briefly analysing the building structure, I noticed some similarities. Most of them can be divided into roof, top window row, middle double window row, and bottom window/door row. There is also usually a central extruded bit, and sometimes a corner.

Based on this, I've decided to make 2-3 variations of basic elements, plus roughly the same amount of façade elements such as statues, columns, patterns. Combine that with several types of tileable textures, and the amount of possible variations is pretty impressive. At the moment, the asset list looks like that:

top_reg x3
top_ctr x3
top_cnr x2

mid_reg x3
mid_ctr x3

bot_reg x3
bot_mid x3
bot_cnr x2

roof_reg x1
roof_cnr x1

window x2

balcony x2

statue_head x2
statue_standing x2

facade_elmt x3

column x2

I may add or get rid of stuff depending on how much time I will have.

Another very interesting thing I noticed while walking around is that buildings in poor condition are covered in mesh to protect the street from falling stucco and dust. The ones that are being renovated have their façades completely covered by scaffolding. All of this can be used to add variety to the level, and maybe block the players path to restrict the area available for exploration. They should be pretty easy to make as well, helping me to conserve time.